Move your a**

Stupido Shop is often seen as a near-legendary indie store. Stupido orders in almost everything that’s released in Finland, which is practically well over a hundred titles a week.

Text Petteri Kainulainen
Photos Vesa Mäkinen

By OK Do: Audible Helsinki

Helsinki’s minimal sounds are unique, but this uniqueness sometimes leaves you yearning for more variety, volume and spontaneity. Here we take the opportunity to think about how to design a more interesting Helsinki from the sonic point of view.

Text Anni Puolakka & Jenna Sutela
Illustration Nene Tsuboi

Electrified

Indie is the new mainstream, and electro is the new dance. In the early 2000s masses of artists fled to Barcelona. Now Berlin has become the unofficial second home of Finnish musicians.

Text Teemu Fiilin
Photos Johannes Ekholm

Portfolio: Eero Johannes

“Choosing typography and illustrations for a poster is kind of similar to piecing together drum sounds and beats and throwing in some samples.”

Text Heini Lehtinen

K-X-P: K-X-P

The main reference of hypnotic music of K-X-P is krautrock from 40 years back, but they do throw in a few afrobeat rhythms, ominously cinematic keyboard sound walls, hippy Middle Eastern melodies and some dancey pulse.

Text Teemu Fiilin

Towards WDC 2012: Idea of a city

What do Helsinkians want for their city? “A trash bag vending machine for dog poo. ” “Free soda, and more soda machines.” “Designer bird houses in parks, so you could hear birds singing in the winter.”

Text Heini Lehtinen

Rock the wine

”Finns are under the impression that wine should be sipped in a wine cellar wearing silk gloves, when actually the producers walk around their vineyards in tattered denim shorts smoking a joint.”

Text Heini Lehtinen
Photos Matti Tanskanen

A beautiful moment in Helsinki

By Suvi Saloniemi

“I claim that Helsinki is one of the best places to play in the world. Helsinkians are at the same time the best audience and the best hosts. But why? We aren’t as suave, bold and numerous as many Central European audiences.”

Photos Osma Harvilahti

Kemmuru: Meiltä puuttuu kaikki

Kemmuru’s hip hop is traditional while being modern, and loose and lazy while being impeccably skilled. Their rhymes merge realistic Average Joe stories with absurd surrealism.

Text Teemu Fiilin

Ricky-Tick Big Band: Ricky-Tick Big Band

The musicians of Ricky-Tick jazz label have succeeded in what few others have before: they have brought big-band swing-jazz credibly into the 21st century.

Text Teemu Fiilin

Koobra: Thrills EP

The debut ep of Koobra is a combination of Italo disco, eighties’ synth pop sound and Balearic house with female vocal samples, in true nineties’ handbag house spirit.

Text Teemu Fiilin

Soundtrack of Tuomas Kallio

“The color of music is now quite white, and new artists and albums are flowing out of the indie rock-folk-electro field, maybe even too much”, says Tuomas Kallio, musician and artistic director of Flow Festival and Pori Jazz.

Text Heini Lehtinen
Photos Verna Kovanen

Organic indie

Kiki Pau has been labeled an over-trendy indie group from Helsinki’s Punavuori, but the band is in fact as organic as a rock group can be in today’s world.

Text Teemu Fiilin
Photos Osma Harvilahti